Search This Blog

Virgil Revisited

One of the most magical passages in the Aeneid occurs when the hero, in search of the golden bough that will allow him entrance to the Underworld, is shown the way by two doves, emblems of his mother, Venus. In David Ferry’s new translation, the moment unfolds as follows:He stood there where he was and watched to seeWhat signs he might be given by how they went,Alighting to feed a little, then flying a little,Alighting a little again to feed on the grass,Then flying a little way, and alighting again,Then flying a little again, feeding and flying,Keeping themselves just far enough aheadSo that they can be seen by him who follows….With all translations of the Aeneid into English, extra words are needed to convey the meaning of the more condensed Latin; this passage in Virgil’s text takes only four lines. But it is what Ferry accomplishes—his delighted attention to the movement of the doves, teasing the reader forward, and again forward, along with Aeneas; and his confidence, as a poet, in this instance to take an even more expansive liberty while keeping the diction pure and plain—that makes this new translation such a marvel throughout.
Ferry’s previous outings with Virgil, in his matchless Eclogues and Georgics, had already convinced me that he has some sort of uncanny connection to the great poet. Especially when reading the Eclogues, one hears a new-old voice, as if Virgil had miraculously learned English and decided it might do as well as Latin. This kind of translation almost needs a new name, to distinguish it from all the other worthy efforts to bring the ancient poets to life: it is an iteration, another version, but also—perhaps, almost—the thing itself.
For centuries, schoolboys and girls “construed” Virgil into English. My own Latin education, which came too late to stick, required me to construe some lines from the Aeneid before a frowning, and then sarcastic, doorkeeper to a graduate program in literature. He seemed to regard my poor performance as no better than could be expected, and passed me on with a sigh. My point is that I am no scholar, and like the vast majority of readers I gratefully apprehend the likes of Virgil and Ovid through their English translators. In the twentieth century, the notable poets who devoted themselves to the task of translation were Rolfe Humphries (whose Metamorphoses remains my favorite) and Robert Fitzgerald, whose Aeneid (as his translations of Homer’s epics do) offers a fluid blank verse beauty somewhat absent in the more straightforward, unmetered version by Robert Fagles.The poet lions Robert Lowell and W.H. Auden, while quite different in many ways, did have in common a classical education and a need to spar with and reinterpret, rather than translate, their ancestors. Notably, Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” reimagines the scene from the Iliad in which Hephaestos forges the images on the shield. But instead of depicting scenes of a cosmological order and prosperity in time of peace, here Auden shows instead desolate landscapes of the twentieth century ravaged by war:A plain without a feature, bare and brown,No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down….Column by column in a cloud of dustThey marched away enduring a beliefWhose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.Auden, here as elsewhere, seeks to “correct” the ancients, as if they were naifs and optimists—an attitude too simple for him to have truly held, but that served its rhetorical purpose for the disappointed rage with which he chronicled contemporary horrors. In “Secondary Epic,” he reproaches, with “No, Virgil, no,” the imperial optimism of the Aeneid and conflates Caesar Augustus, the terrible “blond” conqueror who commissioned the poem from Virgil, with Nazis.Robert Lowell often used the model of the Roman Empire for its many cautionary tales about warfare, ego, and general human folly. As a keen observer and critic of American public life, he well knew that the Aeneid had been embraced since the time of our founders as a kind of model American epic. Just as Aeneas and his Trojans left their scene of defeat and headed west across the sea, guided by Fate, to settle in a new land and establish Rome and empire, so, too, the Puritans left England, where they had been persecuted, sailed west, and founded a new City on a Hill—and its eventual entitlement to empire as well. Lowell found Roman-era militancy profoundly titillating as well as disgusting, which lends an air of shame to his meditations on the classical age throughout his work, including, memorably, in “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid”:And I stand up and heil the thousand men,Who carry Pallas to the bird-priest. ThenThe bird-priest groans, and as his birds foretold,I greet the body, lip to lip. I holdThe sword that Dido used. It tries to speak,A bird with Dido’s sworded breast. Its beakClangs and ejaculates the Punic wordI hear the bird-priest chirping like a bird.I groan a little. “Who am I, and why?”Virgil’s complex relation to how history unfolds always disorients readers, and not only the sleepy ones. Pious Romans believed that history was dictated by Fate, although in incidentals it was guided by the actions of the gods and of human beings. But Virgil’s technical discomfort with how this paradigm plays out in storytelling—where the suspense resides in not what will happen, but how, and where our foreknowledge might make us as readers too detached if the how is not gripping enough—results in, among other things, his famous use of the “historical present” throughout the poem. Again and again, he begins a passage in the past tense and then rushes into the present tense, as if asking us to forget the outcome and join the characters in the suspense of not knowing.
Read more >>>

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Now, whether it were by peculiar grace. A leading from above, a something given..."
- Wordsworth. Resolution and Independence.
My father wanted to be a writer. I can't remember a time when he didn't want this. There were few mornings when he didn't go to his desk early, at about six o'clock in one of his-many suits and coloured shirts, the cuffs pinned by bejewelled links, before he left for work carrying his briefcase, longside the other commuters. Writing was; I suppose, an obsession, and as with most obsessions, fulfillment remained out of reach. The obsession kept him incomplete but it kept him going. He had a dull, enervating civil service job, and writing provided him with something to look forward to. It gave him meaning and 'direction,' as he liked to put it. It gave him direction home too, since he wrote often about India, the country he left in his early '20s and to which he never returned.
…

In 1935, Diego Rivera masterfully created ‘The Flower Carrier’ (known in its original language as ‘Cargador de Flores’). Like many of Rivera’s paintings, ‘The Flower Carrier’ imparts simplicity, yet exudes much symbolism and meaning. The vibrant colors are rubbed into the masonite, a most common method for painting on hard surfaces.

The colourful painting displays a peasant man in white clothing with a yellow sombrero, struggling on all fours with a dramatically oversized basket of flowers that is strapped to his back with a yellow sling. A woman, most likely the peasant’s wife, stands behind him trying to help with the support of the basket as he attempts to rise to his feet. While the flowers in the basket are strikingly beautiful to the viewer, the man does not see their beauty, but only their value as he carries them to the market for sale or exchange. The geometric shapes offer bold and intense contrasts, with each figure, item, and foliage illustrated to reflect individualism. …

The poems of Emily Dickinson began as marks made in ink or pencil on paper, usually the standard stationery that came into her family’s household. Most were composed in Dickinson’s large, airy bedroom, with two big windows facing south and two facing west, at a small table that her niece described as “18-inches square, with a drawer deep enough to take in her ink bottle, paper and pen.” It looked out over the family’s property on Main Street, in Amherst, Massachusetts, toward the Evergreens, her brother’s grand Italianate mansion, nestled among the pines a few hundred yards away. Dickinson had a Franklin stove fitted to a bricked-up fireplace to keep her warm, which meant that she could write by candlelight, with the door closed, for as long as she wanted. In much of the rest of the house, the winter temperature would have been around fifty degrees. Though she usually composed at night, Dickinson sometimes jotted down lines during the day, while gardening or doing chores, wearing a si…

Popular posts from this blog

"Now, whether it were by peculiar grace. A leading from above, a something given..."
- Wordsworth. Resolution and Independence.
My father wanted to be a writer. I can't remember a time when he didn't want this. There were few mornings when he didn't go to his desk early, at about six o'clock in one of his-many suits and coloured shirts, the cuffs pinned by bejewelled links, before he left for work carrying his briefcase, longside the other commuters. Writing was; I suppose, an obsession, and as with most obsessions, fulfillment remained out of reach. The obsession kept him incomplete but it kept him going. He had a dull, enervating civil service job, and writing provided him with something to look forward to. It gave him meaning and 'direction,' as he liked to put it. It gave him direction home too, since he wrote often about India, the country he left in his early '20s and to which he never returned.
…

It is strange to contemplate the destinies of America’s three most prominent women poets of the post-Bogan-Bishop generation: Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton. Two of them committed suicide; the third, Adrienne Rich, had a husband who did. Rich eventually turned into the most militant of lesbian feminists, refusing even to talk to men, except on business matters.

I met Plath only once. She was with Peter Davison, the editor-poet, her then lover; we were waiting to get into the Brattle Theater, just off Harvard Square. During a brief conversation, Miss Plath impressed me as rather plain under her defiantly blondined hair, but lively enough for a Smith girl, a part she looked to a “T.” Adrienne Cecile Rich, a Radcliffe undergraduate, signed up for a poetry course given by Archibald Macleish, in which I was her section man, though not for long. She complained to me, and doubtless also to Macleish, that the course wasn’t stimulating enough, and that, as winner of that year’s Ya…

In 1935, Diego Rivera masterfully created ‘The Flower Carrier’ (known in its original language as ‘Cargador de Flores’). Like many of Rivera’s paintings, ‘The Flower Carrier’ imparts simplicity, yet exudes much symbolism and meaning. The vibrant colors are rubbed into the masonite, a most common method for painting on hard surfaces.

The colourful painting displays a peasant man in white clothing with a yellow sombrero, struggling on all fours with a dramatically oversized basket of flowers that is strapped to his back with a yellow sling. A woman, most likely the peasant’s wife, stands behind him trying to help with the support of the basket as he attempts to rise to his feet. While the flowers in the basket are strikingly beautiful to the viewer, the man does not see their beauty, but only their value as he carries them to the market for sale or exchange. The geometric shapes offer bold and intense contrasts, with each figure, item, and foliage illustrated to reflect individualism. …